Website Help - Created in Xara 4.0

All,

I'm pretty new to the Xara forums and I've been experimenting with making a few websites using Xara Extreme 4.0. Both are fairly simple websites but I've been having a few issues with their creation. Here are the sites:

http://www.hp-ohio.com

http://www.cheaprentrocks.com

The first issue I've come across is that while trying to add in an additional page and exporting I'll get an error message that said a certain image can't be created and therefore the whole set of .htmls will not publish. I've tried adding in a blank page or a duplicate page since all of those images have already exported once, but I get the same message. As you'll see on the cheaprent site, I have a disclaimer that I can't get the band pages to work at the moment. I was trying to add in individual band pages with pictures, links and an introductory paragraph. On the first site, I had a few more pages to finish--teams, links, conferences. But none of them would export without causing an error.

The second issue is that I've had a few people have trouble viewing--the words and graphics will cut off on the right hand side without being able to scroll to see the rest of them. The site is built to an 800 px width hoping to cure that, but the viewer is still having that problem. Is there anyway to anchor the pages to the left instead of center?

The last issue I have is incorporating a paypal form into the code. I thought I could cut and paste it in using Dreamweaver but it wouldn't show up. Is there any way to put that sort of code in using Xara?

Thanks for your help and any feedback on the sites would be appreciated!
Manda

hi there,

looks pretty good to me.

one point I would make, each front page is over 2megs in total. maybe some of the images could be grouped together so as to be exported as single images. this should reduce the file sizes somewhat.
e.g. the hanging ribbon things on hp ohio and the stickers section on cheaprentrecords

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Originally Posted by PyrateM

The first issue I've come across is that while trying to add in an additional page and exporting I'll get an error message that said a certain image can't be created

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Known bug (see http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=33348 ). There is a newer version of htmlfilter.dll (http://www.talkgraphics.com/showpost.php?p=254230 ) you can download and drop over the old one until the next update is released if it's urgent.

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The second issue is that I've had a few people have trouble viewing--the words and graphics will cut off [...] Is there anyway to anchor the pages to the left instead of center?

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Yes by altering the output file. See http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=33437 . You would want to get rid of the page clipping on the outermost div to stop text that goes off the right-hand side disappearing. That would probably be preferable in itself to left-aligning the whole page.

This may be triggered by the person in question having larger font sizes than your default. To reduce the likelihood of this, use font sizes based on the 'pix' unit and not points. ('pt' should never be used on the web.)

In general you can't control font sizes completely, so always include much more whitespace around the edges and make the line spacing much wider to compensate for potentially-larger fonts.

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The last issue I have is incorporating a paypal form into the code. I thought I could cut and paste it in using Dreamweaver but it wouldn't show up. Is there any way to put that sort of code in using Xara?

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No. Probably best to do it by hand: Xtreme's output code is quite complicated, and can be tricky to edit in other visual tools. You could, for example, drop some placeholder text on the page in Xara, then search for the text in a text editor and replace the contents of its containing <div> with the desired form code.

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Originally Posted by sculptex

one point I would make, each front page is over 2megs in total. maybe some of the images could be grouped together so as to be exported as single images. this should reduce the file sizes somewhat.
e.g. the hanging ribbon things on hp ohio and the stickers section on cheaprentrecords

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Another benefit to combining images is that each file used for a web page takes time to access and download because each file must be accessed and transmitted independently. You may have noticed this when copying files on your computer. A lot of small files takes longer to copy than one large file, even if the large file is the same size as all the small files.

This website optimization page calculates that your webpage for HP Ohio takes over 17 seconds to load with a T1 connection.

Wow! Each of your little blurbs is a separate PNG. Group the entire masthead and also name the grouped masthead (press the yellow tag icon) JPEG. This will force the image to export as a JPEG 70% compression and will create a much smaller file size.

sculptex, PatentGuy, gwpriester -- I'll definately go back and fix the images, I didn't even think about how large they were getting and how slow it would load on another machine. :P 2megs and 17 secs... *gulp* not what I was looking for!

BobInce - thanks so much for the links--I downloaded the fix and read through all of the suggestions on the text being cut off. I think the person who was having the trouble viewing did have her defaults set differently. Is there anything special to changing the fonts to pix? Or do you just need to type it in as "12pix" into the font size box?

Thanks for all of your help!! I'm going to take another hack at these and hopefully it will be easier to load and view.

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Originally Posted by PyrateM

do you just need to type it in as "12pix" into the font size box?

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In principle yes. Unfortunately, 12pix just happens to be the same size as 9pt, so Xtreme will still export as a 'pt' font size. Oops! This is the case for all sizes divisible by 4pix, and I'm hoping it'll be fixed in the future. In the meantime, well, you could try 13pix or 12.5pix I suppose...